JOHN CLAVERHOUSE was a moon-faced man. You know the
kind, cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into
the cheeks to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad
and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference, flattened
against the very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the
ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had
become an offence to my eyes, and I believe the earth to be
cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have
been superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the
wrong shoulder at the wrong time.

Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he
had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill
turn. Far from it. The evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so
elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite analysis in
words. We all experience such things at some period in our
fives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who
the very instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at
the first moment of meeting, we say: "I do not like that man."
Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know
only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And
so I with John Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an
optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were
always all right, curse him! Ah! how it grated on my soul that
he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did not
bother me. I even used to laugh myself--before I met John
Claverhouse.

But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing
else under the sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted
me, gripped hold of me, and would not let me go. It was a
huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping it was always
with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like an
enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the
fields to spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching
noon-day glare, when the green drooped and the birds

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